The embroiled Minnesota-based egg factory farm that found itself at the center of a national animal cruelty accusation earlier this month, prompting McDonald’s, Target, and other retailers to the drop the company, is again under attack for lying to and deceiving customers with false and misleading claims about its animal welfare practices.

Mercy For Animals, the animal protection organization that conducted the undercover animal cruelty investigation into Litchfield-based Sparboe Farms, has filed an official complaint with the Federal Trade Commission outlining how the egg producer, they say, has violated federal advertising laws by falsely claiming it “ensures” hens “freedom to express normal behavior,” and “freedom from fear and distress,” “discomfort,” and “pain, injury or disease.”

Meanwhile, the Litchfield Independent Review reports local support is growing for the Litchfield-based company and as far as the companies that dropped Sparboe as a supplier, Representative Dean Urhdahl of Grove City is quoted as saying “these people who dumped Sparboe are simply buying eggs from somebody else who operates exactly the way Sparboe operates.”